As disclosed, the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) intercepts electronic messages through telecommunications and Internet in 195 countries, among which, Greece.
As revealed by TA NEA, Germany also plays "Big Brother", setting up wiretaps in 195 countries and locations, communications of which ait has llegedly monitored since April 2010. The wiretaps were revealed through a document filed during litigation between a German lawyer and the BND. According to this, the intercepts were conducted for reasons of "international terrorism", however the size and scope of the surveillance on foreign targets is not clear.
Lawyer Niko Harding sued BND because he considered that communication via e-mail with foreign customers may be a target of the German secret services and maintains that BND was not legally allowed to keep tabs on him, as a German citizen.
In last year's study of the general secretariat of Internal Affairs of the European Parliament for the rights of EU citizens say that in the operational activities of the German BND “operates a service which can connect directly to digital nodes through which most foreign communications flow. German law allows intelligence agencies to seek up to 20% of 'foreign'communications that contain certain keywords, for the purposes of combating terrorism or the protection of the Constitution. This may only be done on German soil. Technically though, German Embassies abroad are German soil.
The study of the European Parliament states that the largest communications node in Germany is DE-CIX in Frankfurt. A revealing publication by Spiegel, which is mentioned in the study, stated that the German secret services have established special offices and facilities in this position in order to deflect the incoming data traffic, to copy and transpose the data for further analysis at BND's HQ, in Poulach near Munich.
The investigation of TA NEA shows that three telecommunications companies operating in Greece are among the more than 550 DE-CIX members/customers: Forthnet, OTEGlobe, and Cyprus' CYTA, operating in Greece.
The first in Greece to come to an agreement with DE-CIX was OTEGlobe in the mid nineties. The documents produced by the BND in court don't show whether the intercepts were made before the 2005 signing of the agreement between the Greek firm and the German telecommunications hub, however it is clear that the secret services have been conducting such activities at least since April 2010. In May 2011, collaboration between Forthnet and DE-CIX was announced, while CYTA signed an agreement with DE-CIX in April 2014.
As the newspaper said, only Forthnet replied to questions sent by the newspaper to the three companies on the measures taken to ensure confidentiality of telecommunications. "Forthnet fully adopting the orders of Greek legislation and regulatory framework to ensure the confidentiality of communications shall take all necessary technical and organizational measures of network operations for the security of mobile data," noted the firm's response.
Apart from the 3 Greek companies, veritable industry giants also use DE-CIX like facebook, and twitter, Microsoft, Verisign, Yahoo, Amazon, LinkedIn, Ebay and Deutsche Telecom, among others.
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